Painting

"Solace" and the Universal Struggle to Retain Memory

This weekend, A 3 person group show called Solace is premiering at Booth Gallery in New York. This exhibition features the work of figurative artists Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Lou Ros, and Adam Miller. The artists’ works are collectively centered on themes regarding the universal struggle to retain memory and identity. Mallozzi and Ros each deal with the theme on an individual, existential basis. Miller ambitiously documents the experience of an entire nation in the act of redefining itself.

Jean-Paul Mallozzi paints figures that inhabit their environment in isolation, even in groupings that denote relationships. He depicts an emotional state that has been represented by colorfully abstracted, thick pools of saturated paint. The faces and identity of the figures have been purposefully distorted, so as not to be read in an analytic fashion, but rather poignantly felt. His figures find solace in each other, or from within.

Lou Ros is a self taught, former graffiti artist whose Expressionistic portraits and multiple figure compositions are painted in the pale colors of faded nostalgia. His bittersweet imagery conveys a sense of loss, of remembered details that evoke a memory but not are enough to bring it clearly to the forefront of consciousness. In not saying too much, he says more, leaving the unfinished narratives up to the viewer to resolve.

Adam Miller orchestrates grand themes in a Grand Manner straight out of the 16th Century Baroque. In his enormous painting “Quebec”, he takes on the two incredible tasks at once. One, he tells the story of a nation’s struggle for autonomy in the face of racism, class struggle, and the inevitable in-fighting that every revolution faces. And two, he takes on the mantle of History Painting, once considered the highest form of painting in the West, and which has not been attempted on a level this ambitious in decades. The pictorial space his figures inhabit a space that evokes the aerial distortions of a Tiepolo copula. Miller’s composition features over a hundreds figures, from indigenous tribes to influential politicians, all swept up in a Wagnerian operatic version of the Quebecois rallying call of “Je me Souviens”(I remember).––Rob Zeller